I'd like to be able to type in terminal commands of forward/back especially if I went from a directory with a super-long name to home (and want to return back to the directory with the super-long name).

As well as cd - and pushd and popd which others have mentioned, there is also cd $OLDPWD. usually cd $OL<TAB> is enough, auto-completion at work.

When using pushd and popd, bash's dirs builtin can really help out, for example: dirs -v prints the directory stack with one entry per line, prefixed with its position number in the stack. try help dirs for more.

Note that if you want change to a directory named -, should you have one, the above feature poses a problem. you will need to do cd ./-. better still, don't give your directories such names.